Chef Updates Tool for Managing IT Infrastructure as Code
Chef today updated its tool for automating the management of IT infrastructure as part of an effort to further eliminate the need to rely on manual processes that generally fail to scale. John Wyss, vice president of product for Chef, said Chef Infra 16 adds a Unified Mode that provides a more streamlined means of […]
Comparing Three Approaches to Multi-Cloud Security Management
Moving to a multi-cloud environment can bring many advantages, but it also brings huge challenges in managing both the everyday operations and security of multi-cloud infrastructures. To meet these challenges, several approaches to multi-cloud management have arisen. The most common can be roughly grouped into three categories: Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) […]
Rackn Extends Reach of IT-as-Code Framework
Rackn announced the Digital Rebar platform it created to automate the provisioning of bare-metal infrastructure now can be applied simultaneously across multiple physical sites. Company CEO Rob Hirschfeld said Digital Rebar 4.3 makes it possible to manage IT infrastructure as code across highly distributed computing environments. Previously, IT organizations would have needed additional versions of […]
Infrastructure as Code and Six Key Automation Concepts
This summer, I walked into an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) flame war because I was blissfully unaware of just how broadly IaC had been reinterpreted. Reviewing the comments, it’s clear that thinking has evolved since Kief Morris’ 2016 Infrastructure as Code tomb. So, after strapping on my asbestos suit, I decided to dig into what […]
From Pets to X-as-Code: Enabling Control and Predictability for ITOps at Scale
Amy Wheelus, vice president of network cloud at AT&T, recently spoke about declarative predictability at the Open Networking Summit in Antwerp. AT&T is the world’s largest telecommunications company providing mission critical communication services where people’s jobs–and lives–can be on the line. As they move away from labor-intensive IT operations toward cloud-native automation, there is a […]
Speaking the Language of Applications
I arrived early to a meeting, and the pleasant security guard at AT&T suggested I take a look at their innovation museum while I wait. Among motion picture sound technology and life-size photos of switchboard operators on roller-skates stood a transistor prototype. The transistor was invented in Bell labs in 1947, and it changed the […]
Why Your Test Automation Is Failing
If you have been investing in test automation, but it’s not getting you where you think it should, it could be that you approached it superficially. One of the most common issues is that the test part of test automation is rather straightforward to automate, especially with today’s abundance of great automation tools. But jumping […]
Accelerating MVP Development Performance Through DevOps
The core concept of minimum viable product (MVP) is to get maximum learning and understanding regarding what customers want about a product. Learning and understanding is a continuous process requiring a development process that is incremental in nature. That makes DevOps a favorite for CIOs and everyone else who dabbles with MVP development. How can […]
DevOps: The Things We Must Stop
Anytime there is a popular movement in technology (and I would argue any other field), people get carried away. We’ve seen it over and over, and DevOps attracts this kind of attention. In fact, DevOps caters to those who get carried away by mainstream folks screaming, “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!” That type of hyperbole pushes those […]
3 Practical Steps to Employing DevOps
Everyone seems to be talking about DevOps but, if you are new to it, it might all seem a little overwhelming. One of the hardest things about DevOps is knowing where to begin. This is because to “do DevOps” its seems you have to suddenly start using a lot of new processes and tools at […]
Puppet Makes Development Kit Available to Advance DevOps
Organizations that embrace DevOps often find themselves moving from having a paucity of IT automation tools to an embarrassment of riches in short order. As a result, many of the teams involved in those DevOps processes wind up making different IT automation choices. Before too long, the organization finds itself trying to bridge too many […]
Don’t Underestimate the Work
It is relatively common in human endeavor to attempt to figure out how much work will be involved in a project, and be wrong. The more complex the work being done and the organizational system doing it, the further off estimates can be. This was one of the drivers for both Agile and DevOps: to […]
Empower Developers to Build Security into DevOps
Over the past 10 years, as more organizations have made the transition to DevOps, there has been a cultural shift in which security and development teams agree quality is a priority. Yet, even with a shared quality focus, Development, Security and Operation teams still find themselves at odds on the road to continuous delivery of […]
Why DevOps Should Care About SDN
Software-defined networking (SDN) and DevOps are not mutually exclusive. Actually, DevOps wants SDN, whether it knows it yet or not. Why? If software is going to eat the world, then SDN is going to eat networking. Networks are becoming more complex, and one way to manage them more effectively is through SDN. Also, organizations are […]
5 Reasons DevOps Needs NetDevOps
Networking’s role in DevOps is not accurately defined. Up to this point, networking has been integrated into DevOps through infrastructure as code (IaC), which has been around since the beginning of the DevOps movement. Although important, this does not quite encompass all of what networking needs within DevOps. A few of the current terms being […]
Infrastructure-Testing Dominoes
Understanding the artifacts of a given technology component is critical to an enterprise-class DevOps service offering. Second-most critical is understanding the dependencies between given components. Testing helps illuminate those dependencies. For example, let’s assume I have a server running the previous version of the Windows operating system (OS) that I now want to upgrade to […]
Infrastructure as Code is SDN for Ops
As we continue to recognize the importance of DevOps—particularly its automation and orchestration aspects—to achieve the agility necessary for continuous deployment of apps, the question of how the term “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) applies to traditionally network-bound systems and services is bound to crop up more frequently. After all, in addition to core IP-based networking characteristics […]
Agile Infrastructure: Because your Infrastructure Deserves Tests, Too
Editor’s Note: This post was updated Aug. 4, 2018, to reflect an updated slide presentation at the end of the article. Infrastructure as Code is a truly powerful concept whose significance is best described with the words of Adam Jacob, CTO at Chef, in Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time: “Enable the reconstruction of […]
Version your infrastructure
Infrastructure is code, and like any code, you need to version it. Notice how that works: If it’s infrastructure, then it’s a fundamental part of the system; nothing’s going to work without it, which makes it valuable. So valuable that in full-stack deployments, it is part of the application. And if it’s code, then it […]
Network Engineers as Programmers? Not so fast.
It is interesting, as the triplet new waves of hype evolve – cloud, SDN, and DevOps – that we are repeatedly hearing The Voice of Reason say things like “All network engineers need to be programmers”. While this is certainly not the only voice that demonstrates what I’m talking about, an example of it is […]
Infrastructure-as-code, new rules for the old game
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding DevOps and its role in fostering quality and continuous improvement through increased levels of automation. In turn, this automation is fostered through emerging infrastructure and software architectures that are exposing control plane and management programming interfaces, which has been dubbed in many circles as Infrastructure-as-Code. This movement allows […]
Meet Infrastructure as Code
Maybe you have already heard the terms “Programmable Infrastructure” and “Infrastructure as code”. But even if you have not, if you are interested in DevOps it’s something you need to know. Most new lingo causes me to roll my eyes. But in this case, it’s not just new lingo, it’s an entirely new concept. Besides making […]